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Tuesday, 20 June 2017

CIVIL SERVANTS MISUSE POVERTY FUNDS

Public servants in
Swaziland have been accused of using funds meant to alleviate poverty for
themselves. More than E16 million (US$1.1 million) may have been misspent.

The Public Accounts
Committee (PAC) was told the money was meant for the Community Poverty Reduction Fund (CPRF) but more than 40 workers
including teachers, police officers, soldiers and government officials had
siphoned off funds for their own purposes.

The
Swazi News reported on Saturday (17 June
2017), ‘even officials from the Ministry of Tinkhundla
Administration and Development who were the custodians of the fund’, had ‘taken
a piece of the pie’.

The
fund was set up in 2010 and as soon as it was established each of them applied
for loans, ‘and seven years later, a
majority of them have not paid even a cent back’.

The newspaper reported, ‘Instead
of starting business projects, some of the officers used the funds to pay for
their children’s university fees in South Africa.’

Two thirds of the people in Swaziland continued to
live below the poverty line, Amnesty
International reported in February 2017. Around half
the population said they often went without food and water, and over a third
said that medical care was inadequate.

In Swaziland, nearly seven in 10 of the kingdom’s 1.3
million people have incomes of less than $US2 a day. Meanwhile, King Mswati
III, who rules Swaziland as sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch lives a
lavish lifestyle, with at least 13 palaces, fleets of top-of-the-range Mercedes
Benz and BMW cars and at least one Rolls Royce. He has a private jet airplane
and is soon
to get a second.